Candlenight

Chapter I

Laughter trickled after him out of the inn.

Ingley's mouth tightened and he would have turned back, but this was no time to lose his temper. In a hurry now. Knew what it was he was looking for. Could almost hear it summoning him, as if the bells were clanging in the tower.

Besides, he doubted the laughter was intended to be offensive. They were not hostile in the village — yes, all right, they insisted on speaking Welsh in public all the time, as if none of them understood anything else. But he could handle that. As long as they didn't get in his way.

"Torch," he'd demanded. "Flashlight. Do you have one I could borrow?"

"Well…" Aled Gruffydd, the landlord, had pondered the question as he pulled a pint of beer, slow and precise as doctor drawing a blood sample.

The big man, Morgan somebody, or somebody Morgan, had said, very deadpan, "No flashlights here. Professor. Blindfold we could find our way around this place."

"… and pissed," a man called out by the dartboard. Blindfold and pissed."

Aled Gruffydd laid the pint reverently on a slop-mat and then produced from behind the bar a big black flashlight, "But we keep this," he said, "for the tourists. Rubber, Bounces, see."

Morgan laughed into his beer, a hollow sound.

"Thanks," Ingley said, ignoring him. "I… my notes, And a couple of books. Left them in the church. Probably there in the morning, but I need to know." He smiled faintly. "If they aren't, I'm in trouble."

The landlord passed the rubber torch across the bar to him. "One thing. Doctor Ingley. Batteries might be running down a bit, so don't go using it until you need to. There's a good bit of moon for you, see."

"Quite. You'll have it back. Half an hour or so, yes?"

"Mind the steps now," Gruffydd said.

There was a short alleyway formed by the side of the inn where he'd taken a room and the ivy-covered concrete wall of an electricity sub-station. From where it ended at some stone steps Thomas Ingley could hear the river hissing gently, could smell a heady blend of beer and honeysuckle.

This pathway had not been built with Ingley in mind. The alley had been almost too narrow for his portly body, now the steps seemed too steep for his short legs. On all his previous visits to the church he'd gone by car to the main entrance. Hadn't known about the steps until somebody had pointed them out to him that morning. The steps clambered crookedly from the village to the church on its hillock, an ancient man-made mound rising suddenly behind the inn.

As the landlord had said, there was a moon — three parts full, but it was trapped behind the rearing church tower (medieval perpendicular, twice repaired in the nineteenth century) and there were no lights in the back of the inn to guide him up the steps. So he switched on the torch and found the beam quite steady.

Ingley had lied about leaving notes in the church. Kept everything — because you couldn't trust anybody these days — under the loose floorboard beneath his bed. He wondered what the hell he would have done if one of the regulars had offered to help him. Can't go up there on your own in the dark, Professor — break your neck, isn't it? He'd have been forced to stroll around the place, pretending to search for his documents, the tomb tantalisingly visible all the while, then have to wait for the morning to examine it. Too long to wait.

He never put anything off any more. If one had a line to pursue, strand to unravel, one should go on regardless of ritual mealtimes, social restraints, the clock by which man artificially regulated — and therefore reduced — his life.

And depressingly, with Ingley's condition, one never knew quite how much time one had left anyway.

He set off up the jagged steps.

A bat flittered across the torchbeam like an insect. Bats, like rats, were always so much smaller than one imagined.

Ingley paused halfway up the steps. Had to get his breath. Ought to rest periodically — doctor's warning. He scowled. Stood a moment in the scented silence. Did the sense of smell compensate for restricted vision in the dark? Or were the perfumes themselves simply more potent after sunset?

A sudden burst of clinking and distant clatter, then a strong voice in the night. A voice nurtured, no doubt, by the male choir and the directing of sheepdogs on windy hills.

"Professor! Dr. Ingley! Where are you. man?"

Morgan. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. Snapping off the torch, he held himself very still on the steps. Or as still as one could manage when one was underexercised. overweight and panting.

"Prof, are you all right?"

Of course I am. Go away. Go away. Go away. Thomas Ingley stayed silent and clenched his little teeth.

Another voice, speaking rapidly in Welsh, and then Morgan said "O'r gorau" OK, then — must mean that, surely. And the heavy front door of the inn closed with a thunk that sounded final.

Ingley waited a while, just to be sure, and then made his way slowly to the top of the steps. Emerging onto the plateau of the churchyard, he stopped to steady his breathing. The sky was a curious moonwashed indigo behind the rearing black tower and the squat pyramid of its spire. A dramatic and unusual site in this part of Wales, where most people worshipped in plain, stark, Victorian chapels — rigid monuments to nineteenth century Puritanism. Even the atmosphere here was of an older, less forbidding Wales. All around him was warmth and softness and musty fragrance; wild flowers grew in profusion among the graves, stones leaning this way and that, centuries deep.

Not afraid of graves. Graves he liked.

"Dyma fedd Ebenezer Watkins," the torch lit up, letters etched into eternity. "1858–1909."

Fairly recent interee. Ingley put out the light again, saving it for someone laid to rest here well over four centuries before Ebenezer Watkins. Excited by the thought, he made straight for the door at the base of the tower, straying from the narrow path by mistake and stumbling over a crooked, sunken headstone on the edge of the grass. Could fall here, smash one's skull on the edge of some outlying grave and all for nothing, all one's research. "Don't be stupid," he said aloud, but quietly. He often gave himself instructions. "Put the bloody light back on."

Followed the torchbeam to the door, which he knew would be unlocked. "A hospice, sanctuary I suppose you would say, in medieval times," Elias ap Siencyn had told him. "And today, is there not an even greater need for sanctuary?" Impressive man, ap Siencyn, strong character and strong face, contoured like the bark of an old tree. Too often these days one went to consult a minister about the history of his church to be met by a person in a soft dog collar and jeans who knew nothing of the place, claiming Today's Church was about people, not architecture.

At the merest touch the ancient door swung inwards (arched moulded doorway, eighteenth century) and the churchy atmosphere came out to him in a great hollow yawn. He was at once in the nave, eight or nine centuries or more enfolding him, cloak of ages, wonderful.

All the same, was it not taking tradition too far to have no electricity in the church, no lights, no heating?

Inside, all he could see were steep Gothic windows, translucent panes, no stained glass, only shades of mauve stained by the night sky. He knew the way now and, putting out the torch, moved briskly down the central aisle, footsteps on stone, tock, tock, tock.

Stopped at the altar as if about to offer a prayer or to cross himself.

Hardly. Ingley didn't sneer this time, but it was close.

Table laid for God. A millennium or more of devotion, hopes and dreads heaped up here and left to go cold. Confirmed atheist, Thomas Ingley. Found the altar just about the least interesting part of the church.

He'd stopped because this was where one turned sharply left, three paces, to get to the secret core of the place, the heart of it all. Simply hadn't realised it until tonight. Been up here five times over the weekend. Missing, each time, the obvious.

Decidedly cool in the church, but Ingley was sweating in anticipation and the torch was sticky in his hand. A weeping sound, a skittering far above him in the rafters: bats again. Then a silence in which even the flashlight switch sounded like the breach of a rifle.

Clack!

And the beam was thrown full in the face of the knight.

Like a gauntlet, Thomas Ingley thought, in challenge. Slap on one cheek, slap on the other. This is it. Lain there for centuries and nobody's given a sod who you were or what you were doing here. But you've slept long enough. Taking you on now, sir, taking you on.

The stone eyelids of the knight stayed shut. His petrified lips wore a furtive smile. His stone hands, three knuckles badly chipped, were on his breast, together in prayer. The beam of light tracked downwards, over the codpiece to the pointed feet.

"All right, friend," Thomas Ingley said, speaking aloud again, laying the torch on the effigy, taking out a notebook, felt-tip pen, his reading glasses. Nuts and bolts time. "Let's get on with it."

He made detailed notes, with small drawings and diagrams, balancing the notebook on the edge of the tomb beneath the light. He drew outlines of the patterns in the stone. He copied the inscriptions in Latin and in Welsh, at least some of which he suspected had been added later, maybe centuries after the installation of the tomb. Tomorrow, perhaps, buy a camera with a flash, do the thing properly. Tonight, just had to know.

Finally he took from his jacket pocket a retractable metal rule and very carefully measured the tomb. It was about two feet longer than the effigy. The inscription in stone identified its occupant as Sir Robert Meredydd. An obscure figure. If indeed, thought Ingley, he had ever existed.

The main inscription, he was now convinced, had been done later, the slab cemented to the side of the tomb; he could see an ancient crack where something had gone amiss, been repaired. He put away rule, notebook, pen, spectacles. Picked up his torch from the knight's armoured belly.

Got you now, friend. Yes.

For a moment, in the heat of certainty, all his principles deserted him and he wanted to tear the tomb open, take up a sledgehammer or something and smash his way in.

Involuntarily, he shouted out, "Got you!" And now he really did slap the effigy, full in its smug, smiling face.

A certain coldness spread up his arm as the slap resounded from the rafters.

Ingley stepped back, panting, shocked at himself. He felt silence swelling in the church.

The knight's cold face flickered. The torch went out.

Batteries.

Couldn't say he hadn't been warned. Too absorbed in his work to notice it growing dim. He shook the torch; a mean amber glimmer, then it died.

Mission accomplished, anyway. Retreating into the aisle, he glanced over his shoulder at the stone husk on the tomb, its dead lips luminously purpled by the colour of the night through the long windows. He would go now. He hurried down the aisle, tock, tock, tock.

As if to guide him on his way, five yards distant, at the entrance to the nave, close to the font (heptagonal, nineteenth-century replacement) a meagre flame appeared, like a taper. When he moved forward to try and see it more clearly, the small light moved with him, as if whoever held it was backing away.

"I'm sorry," Ingley said, raising his head and his voice, authoritative, irascible, producing an echo. "Who is there?"

there… there… ere…

He registered, disturbed, that the little flame cast no ambience. It was like the light through a keyhole, something on the other side of the dark.

Then it went out.

Was somebody with him now in the church? Somebody who'd seen him by the tomb, who would tell then what he'd been doing? Who'd now doused his light to…

Blindfold we could find our way around this place…

More likely he was simply overexcited and overtired. He stood very still, disgusted at his heart for suddenly pulsing in his chest like some squirming animal. Pills, where were his pills?

"Finished now. Leaving," he said to nobody, ving… ing…

Back in the inn, that was where they were, the pills. On the dresser in his room.

". Leaving, all right…?"

… ight.

There was nobody. Nobody at all. He walked down the aisle to the great door, which was open a crack — had he left like that? Thought perhaps he had, certainly didn't remember closing it. He glanced back into the church, towards the altar and the tomb, neither visible now. Saw only the tall Gothic windows tinctured in amethyst. He grasped the iron ring handle and hauled the door closed behind him, hearing the muffled echo of the latch from within.

Out then, gratefully, into the remembered warmth of a summer night, into the churchyard's terraced circle, from here one could look down on the yellow glowing of the village. Relieved, he took a great gulp of the soft night air.

The air was hard and slammed into his throat and locked there.

Ingley spun round, blinking.

No lights.

No village.

No moon.

He clutched at the stone porch and the breath came out of him like razorblades.

The circular cemetery was an island in a dark, polluted sea. The sky was black, and something was swirling about him, plucking playfully at his jacket.

He hauled in another breath, it didn't want to come. He slapped at his jacket where the dark wind was fingering it like a pickpocket.

The breath came up like an anchor through mud. His chest seemed to creak. Cold too out here now, and damp. No sweet smells any more.

Then the true essence of the place came to him, faint at first, and shocking because…

"Oh, Christ!" The little fat man, clamping a cupped hand over his mouth and nose, was thrown back by the stench.

Stench?

Yes, yes, vile, decaying, putrid… as if the season had betrayed them and the scented flowers had choked and bloated on their stems. He knew that stink, had always known it. He knew it from hospital wards and his stricken mother's bedroom, from dustbins in summer and the yard behind his father's butcher's shop. And he knew, sad and angry now, that it was not as it seemed. It was within him — had to be — the blackness, the smell, the withering.

His own lights going out.

Poor old Ingley, historian, antiquary, awkward customer, abrupt sometimes, knew it — but so little time to do things, always so little time. Hang on to things. Hang on to reality— single-chamber church with tower to the West, perpendicular, wooden bell-stage, pyramidal two-tiered roof…

Then, at first vaporous and indistinct, above a middle-distant grave, possibly the grave of Ebenezer Watkins, rose the little flame. Rose up and hovered, steamy and flickering as if in the hand of a still, dark figure, waiting. And blue this time, a cold and gaseous blue.

Ingley began to sob, and it was bitterly painful in his chest.

Chapter II

The corpse wore a shroud and a silly smile, and its hair was sticking out like wires. The five people standing around its coffin were gloomily dressed in black or dark brown — but they too were smiling.

Bethan was not smiling. It ought to have been comical, but it seemed all the more sinister and graphically real without the benefit of perspective. With the figures ludicrously out of proportion, big heads like grinning toffee apples on black sticks, it resembled some crude medieval engraving.

She turned over the exercise book to look at the name on the cover, and she was right. Sali Dafis, it said unevenly in capitals. She turned back to the drawing. Underneath it the childish script said in Welsh, Old Mrs. Jones, Ty Canol, died on Friday. We all went in to see her. She was in her coffin. It was on the table. Nain said she knew Mrs. Jones would die soon because she saw the cannwyll gorff in the churchyard and it went all the way to Mrs. Jones's door.

On the facing page, another drawing showed a white gravestone against a sky crosshatched with dark-blue crayon. In the sky were a half-moon and several stars and something that looked like a bigger star hanging over the grave. Underneath this one was written, Here is the cannwyll gorff over the grave of Mr. Tegwyn Jones. He is sending it to fetch his wife.

"God." Bethan said and slapped the exercise book face down on the sofa.

She'd told the children to pretend they were working for the papur bro, the community newspaper in Pontmeurig, and to write about something that had happened in their own village which they thought people ought to know about. Of the results she'd seen so far, most had been predictably innocuous. Carys Huws had written about the haymaking, and how the famers were hoping to have it finished in time to go to the Royal Welsh agricultural show. Bobi Fon had described the chairman's chair his father, the carpenter, had made for Glanmeurig District Council.

But both Cefyn Lewis and Glyn Jones had described the Gorsedd Ddu meeting in the oakwoods at dead of night to judge the traitors and the cowards — writing as if it had really happened, although both were old enough to know the difference between history and legend.

And now Sali had written again of some sinister, imaginary aspect of death.

Slowly, to calm herself, Bethan poured out a mug of tea. Yesterday she'd overheard Glyn and Cefyn telling little Nerys Roberts about the toili, as if it were a regular feature of village life. Nerys was big-eyed and pale. Bethan, furious, had sent the two boys out into the yard, from where they'd grinned slyly at her through the window.

Buddug, she thought. Buddug is behind this.

She sipped the tea; it was horribly strong and bitter. Bethan grimaced. Corpse candles, phantom funerals. The knocking, the moaning, the bird of death. It was insidious.

The tea in the pot was as dense as peat. She went into the kitchen to make some more, pulling the rubber band from her black hair, shaking her head and letting the hair fall softly, comfortingly around her shoulders. She felt very alone.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, Bethan stood by the window, wondering whether to take up smoking again, and she thought, I hate weekends.

Outside the window it was Saturday night in Pontmeurig. Only eight miles — and yet a whole world — away from the village of Y Groes. Barely four thousand people lived in this town now, but it still had seventeen pubs. Considering how much of the population was either too young, too sick or too ostensibly clean-living to go out for a drink, that left…well, it made Bethan wonder how they'd all survived, the seventeen pubs.

She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, smudging the remains of her make-up and not caring; she would not be going anywhere tonight.

Just before ten o'clock, Guto Evans phoned.

"What are you doing then, Bethan, at this moment?"

"Nothing illegal," Bethan said cautiously.

"That's a shame," Guto said. He paused, hesitated. "Look, the night, as they say, is young. Why don't we go out and paint the town? Any colour you like, except for grey, which nobody would notice."

Bethan pictured him with the phone tucked into his shaggy beard, like a big terrier with a bone, his stocky frame wedged into a comer of his mother's front parlour amid hundreds of plates and china ornaments.

"I don't think so," Bethan said solemnly into the phone, her glasses slipped and with one finger she pushed them back along her nose. "I have my reputation to protect. You could lead me into bad ways."

"One drink, then? A chat?"

"I'm sorry, Guto, I do appreciate it. It's just… well, I've such a lot of work to catch up on."

And she drew him away from the subject by asking if he'd heard about the unfortunate incident at that afternoon's protest demo by some of their mutual friends in the sometimes-militant Welsh Language Society. The society targeted a particular estate agent in Aberystwyth who specialised in selling country' cottages in Welsh-speaking areas to affluent English people looking for holiday homes.

"It got seriously out of hand, of course." Bethan said, some of the boys had collected For Sale signs out of people's gardens and heaped them up outside Hughes's door. And what should someone do but pour paraffin over the pile and set them alight. If the fire brigade had not arrived in time, who knows, the whole building might have gone up."

"Would have been no great loss. Bloody Emyr Hughes. Him and his new Mercedes. And a helicopter now, did you hear?" Guto snorted. "Traitorous fat bastard. Grown fat on English gold."

Bethan smiled. Guto sharpening up his rhetoric, now, because it was rumoured Burnham-Lloyd was a very sick man and there might soon be a by-election. "So Dewi and Alun Phillips were arrested," she said. 'They will probably be charged tomorrow. Wilful damage, I hope. Not arson."

"Of course, I would have been there myself," Guto said. "But I am keeping a low political profile until such time I am called."

"Well, there's sensible." said Bethan, in mock-surprise. She paused, "Um, it was nice of you to ask me out."

"Yes," said Guto. "I am a nice man, this is true."

"But I must get back to my marking."

"Should I call again some time?"

"Yes. When I'm not so busy."

"And when will that be? No, no, it's all right. I might be nice but I'm not daft. Goodnight, Bethan. Nos da."

"Guto, have you ever found…?"

"What?"

She had been going to ask about the cannwyll gorff. She stopped herself. What could she say? Guto, I'm scared. There is something badly wrong in the village and I don't think I can handle it.

"Hello… Bethan…?"

But if she said any more then Guto would say it was quite clear that in her state of mind Bethan should not be spending the night alone, and so…

"Are you still there, Bethan?"

"Yes… I… It doesn't matter," she said. "Nos da, Guto."

"You take care of yourself," he said.

It would have been nice to go out for a drink. And a chat, Just a chat. She wondered: did I say no because it would not be seemly for a widow of less than a year to be seen out with Guto Evans on a Saturday night in Pontmeurig?

No, she decided. If I'd thought that I would have gone.

Saturday night was probably the reason the seventeen pubs survived.

They had come into Pontmeurig now, from all the outlying villages and the hill farms, sometimes six or seven of them in a single Land-Rover. Farmers, farmers' sons, farmers' grandsons. Even a few women, these days. Some of the men would get quietly and expertly drunk. A handful would make a macho celebration out of it, and there would perhaps be a fight, a smashed window, a beer glass flung in the street, splintering against the kerb or somebody's head.

A yellow haze of smoke and steam, beer fumes and chip fat settled on the street below the lighted window of the apartment over Hampton's bookshop. In the window, Bethan was a still silhouette.

She drew the thin curtains, turned back to the sadly over-crowded sitting room, drank tea and glared at the dark green cover of the book lying on the sofa. Sali Dafis. Aged seven.

A bright child. Confident too — winner of the recitation prize for her age-group at this year's Urdd Eisteddfod, where three other children from the school had also won prizes. Which was incredible for a little village school with twenty-four pupils. One of the judges had commented this was clearly a school where children were encouraged to be imaginative. He could say that again. Bethan thought. She remembered Buddug, huge and beaming, in audience. Buddug, quite rightly, taking all the credit because Bethan had been away looking after a sick husband,

Then mourning for a dead husband.

She was back now. She didn't have to return, she'd terminated her lease on the cottage. She could have gone anywhere, stayed in the city, where there was no silence and no sense of a gathering darkness.

Parting the curtains, Bethan looked down into the street, watched four youths standing outside the Drovers' Arms nursing beer glasses, admiring a motor bike. She thought, I should have gone. Maybe it was my last chance. I've been too long with death.

Irritated and restless now, she snatched the green exercise book from the sofa. Sali Dafis was the daughter of the man who ran the garage. Her mother had died when Sali was a baby; the child had been raised by her grandmother, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis. a withered crone who dispensed heart remedies and told fortunes.

And who, Bethan thought, frowning, was also a friend of Buddug's.

She got out her red pen, intending not to mark Sali's exercise but to write, "See me after school" at the bottom it, because the child needed help. She had a vague memory of Sali's mother, a little blonde-haired secretary from Essex whom Dilwyn had met on holiday.

As she started to write "gwel . at the bottom of the second drawing, Bethan's red ballpoint pen ran out. Without thinking, she bustled into the bedroom to pinch a pen from the inside pocket of Robin's jacket in the wardrobe. Stood there with the wardrobe door half-open, a hand inside feeling from coat to coat. Her coats. Realising then that Robin's jacket had never been in this bedroom, had gone long ago to the Oxfam shop, probably with the pens still in the pocket.

I'm not going to cry, she told herself. I'm going to laugh. But she couldn't make her lips go through the motions.

She heard a scornful, trailing cheer from the street outside, as she went back into the living room, edging around cumbersome furniture she didn't need any more..

A male voice hooted and a girl screamed in excitement as Bethan sat down at the table to continue her note to Sali in pencil.

"Geraint, don't…!" the girl squealed in the street and Bethan knew that whatever it was Geraint was doing the girl really didn't mind. It was about romance.

Bethan looked up from the table. By the wan light of the Victorian brass standard lamp, their first Christmas present from Robin's mother in Durham, she saw a little attic flat over somebody else's failed bookshop in a town which had been falling apart for five centuries.

Single person's accommodation, Bethan thought.

She broke down then, a hot rush of despair, over the horror-comic drawings of Sali Dafis, aged seven.

For three nights before Robin died, the village women said, the cannwyll gorff had been seen. First in the churchyard, then over the river.

Finally, hanging solemnly in the still air outside their cottage.

When Bethan raised her head from the table she saw that the pages of the exercise book were crumpled and tear-stained, I spilled tea on your book, she would tell Sali on Monday, I shall have to give you a new one. I'm sorry. All your nice drawings.

Feeling suddenly light-headed, she almost rang Guto back to say yes, she would go out with him and they would get very, very drunk.

She didn't, though. It was not the time.

Chapter III

Above him the whitewashed ceiling gleamed faintly between beams as thick as railway sleepers. The heavy bed of Victorian mahogany was creaking below like the timbers a sailing ship.

Sinking.

Head rolling back on the pillow, he closed his eyes.

… And his mind was alive with images, burgling his brain like fragments of a dream getting through from other side of sleep, as if they couldn't wait. Black tower in a purple sky, perpendicular tower, wooden bell-stage, in tiers…

Always ends in tiers, he thought ludicrously. Opening his eyes again, he tried to calm his thoughts, remembering pushing at the door of the inn to escape from the cloying dark. Then the yellow light, beer haze, oak beams, the ceaseless banter — the overwhelming relief of it, of being back amongst these tiresome people with their impenetrable language. Still not closing time when he'd returned. How had he made it back so quickly?

Pounding pain in his chest now. He reached to the bedside cabinet for a Trinitrin. Slipped it under his tongue.

How had he got back? He remembered the stink of decay all around him in the churchyard. Remembered trying to find the steps in the mist. Then nothing until the door and the yellow light. Inside, they had seemed almost pleased to see him.

"All right then, Professor?"

"Well hell, man, you look cold…"

"Course he's cold, Morgan. Bloody church — sorry, Reverend — always cold, that church. No heating, see. Get him a drink, for God's sake, Aled."

"Oh, I'm so sorry. Doctor Ingley. Should have replaced these batteries weeks ago, but you know how it is. Look, my fault, have a drink. What is it to be now, nice drop of brandy? Best Welsh brandy, mind…"

"Thank you, no. I think I'll go directly to bed."

"Big mistake, Professor. First time this year Aled's offered anybody a free tot of his precious bloody brandy. Never see it again."

"Leave him be, Morgan. Poor man's knackered."

"Oh aye, leave him be, now, is it Aled? Any excuse, you bugger."

"I'm sorry, I… good night."

"Night, Professor."

"Nos da i chi!"

Still the pain.

Another Trinitrin. Worked in seconds, they always worked in seconds. He lay there in the bed, not moving, the pill under his tongue. It was a small room; just beyond the bed was a lumbering Victorian wardrobe, to its right the uncurtained window hanging open for air, bringing in the sounds of glasses jingling as they were collected in the bar below, laughter, oaths, a nos da or two.

He was uncomfortable and tried to roll over. But when he moved the pain ripped through his chest like the roots of a tree being torn out of the ground, Christ.

Breathe. Come on, breathe steadily.

His eyes closed by themselves.

Creaking of the bed. Wooden bed. Wooden bellstage, moulded doorway eighteenth-century, heptagonal font, perpendicular tower… black on purple… falling…

God in heaven, I don't know where I am…

Blindfold we could find our way…

Calm down. It wasn't a candle, candle, andle, ndle…

Sharp, probing pain now, deep in his chest, like a slender knife going in…

… and his eyes came open, to show him there was a candle. At the bottom of the bed. Just above his feet. The flame did not waver.

He shut out the image in frozen panic. It was only a symbol, a motif summoned by his subconscious, an hallucination, a manifestation of the corruption in his system — a sick body's attempt to bring down the mind to its own level of decay.

Dying people, he thought in silent hysteria, conjured up choirs of angels, all that nonsense. Chemicals. And his own chemicals now, flooding about uncontrollably, mixing the toxic cocktails, how ironic they should throw off such an image. The corpse candle. Harbinger of death. Flickering from the periphery of his scholarly probings into a society still obsessed with its own mythology.

He could make this candle go away. He could send it back to his subconscious. He was furious now. He would not submit to this invasion. And he would not die. Damned if he would.

Damned if he…

Ingley squeezed his eyes shut, trying to squeeze rationality into his thoughts… and found himself walking up the aisle of the church, footsteps on stone, tock, tock, tock…

Turn back, turn back, turn back…! tock, tock, tock…

Can't… Can't go on… Must go back…

Drawn steadily down the aisle towards the steep window leaking livid light into the nave.

He struggled frantically to open his eyes, didn't care now what arcane symbol they would show him, so long as it could pull him out of this place of old, forgotten, stinking evil. He felt himself rolling about in the bed, sweating cold fluid, screaming inside. But his eyelids, fastened down like heavy blinds, would not move. He remembered as a boy being shut by older boys inside a wall cupboard where there was barely room to breathe and heaving at the door in helpless panic, his first experience of claustrophobia, the stifling terror. tock… tock…

Please. Let me go. I'm sorry, oh God, I'm sorry.

It was cold in the church. The altar cloth was white, with a mulberry splash, like an old bloodstain, where it caught light through the long windows. The altar was where you turned left, three paces to…

No…!"

Three paces. tock…

The air thickened and vibrated with a frigid energy. tock…

No. Please… Can't… Jesus Christ, let me out! tock

A long black shadow arose in his path. He screamed. Screamed to get out of the church. Screamed for his eyes to open. But it was as if, while his mind was elsewhere, both lids had been very precisely stitched up.

… but the stone eyelids of the knight sprang open, and his eyes were of cold amethyst light. His hands unclasped from prayer, chipped knuckles, white bone beneath the stone, seeking one's throat. His stone mouth splintered into a grin.

Thomas Ingley threw all that remained of his strength into the fight to re-enter his bedroom at the inn, like pushing and pushing at a seized-up manhole cover to escape from the fetid cellar, the strain tearing at his poor exhausted heart, stretching and popping like rotted rubber.

Don't want to know who you are. Don't care anymore who you are! But please… don't let it happen here, to be held forever among the deep shadows and the misty mauveness…

The stone hands locked around his windpipe. His eyeballs bulged.

And his eyes opened.

Lids flicking up with a butterfly motion. Effortless.

The room was quiet and the air was still. He could see the wardrobe in the corner by the door. The moon through the uncurtained window. The luminous green hands of the travel alarm clock, although he couldn't make out how they were arranged.

Inside his chest he felt nothing at all. The bed was silent now, no creaks. He expected to find the bedclothes in knots, but the sheets were still stiffly tucked in around him. Hospital corners. He lay calmly motionless and listened to his breathing, steady now. Nor could he feel his heart pounding any more.

So peaceful.

The relief was so great that he didn't try to move, just let his head sink into the pillow and his gaze drift up to the ceiling, where the little light hung in a frosty miasma about six inches above his left temple. He went on watching the light, fully resigned now, as it turned from blue to pink… to blood red.

He tried to scream then, his face twisting, but it came out as a parched rattle.

Chapter IV

This was the thing about Wales. Some places seemed cursed — filthy weather, soil you could hardly grow dandelions in — and some places, like this village, had it all. The change, when you came out of the forestry, the other side of the Nearly Mountains, was dramatic and yet subtle too… the landscape greener, the weather milder, the whole atmosphere all-round mellower.

It embraced you, he thought, like a good woman,

The better to appreciate it, Dai Death, the undertaker in Pontmeurig, stopped his hearse in the middle of the road, where it left the forestry, and looked down on the village in its little cwm. Sunday afternoon. No hurry. It had looked like rain in Pontmeurig- but the sky over Y Groes was as deep a blue as you could ever expect to see in Wales.

The cottages were a clutch of eggs in a nest; the church a benevolent old bird.

A clutch of eggs, yes. Nice metaphor. Dai liked to write a bit of poetry and aspired to the crown of the Glanmeurig Eisteddfod. Sitting at the wheel of his hearse, window wound down and the sunlight warm on his bald head, he lit a cigarette, feeling happy because he liked doing business in Y Groes and it wasn't often he got the chance — not because nobody died here, but because they had little use for undertakers. He wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could look out at such a place from his deathbed and hold on to any hopes of going to a greater paradise,

By all accounts, though, today's customer had been in no position to dwell upon the relative merits of a hypothetical heaven and the village of Y Groes. He'd gone in the night when, Dai supposed, Y Groes looked much the same as any other village.

An engine grumbled at him from behind. In his wing mirror he saw a tractor that couldn't get past, it being a narrow road and the farmer not wanting to sound his horn because he could see a coffin in the back of Dai's hearse — how was he to know it was empty?

"All right, man. I'm off."

Dai tossed his cigarette out of the window, raised an apologetic hand and put the hearse in gear. Normally he might have let out the clutch sharpish like, and shot off in a spurt — bouncing the pale utility coffin into the air, giving the bugger on the tractor one hell of a shock. But he didn't like to do that now.

Not here.

For Dai's greatest aspiration, even closer to his heart than the thought of wearing the plastic crown at the Glanmeurig Eisteddfod, was to get himself a cottage in this village and retire one day to paradise.

He was on his own today, his brother Harri still in Bronglais Hospital with his back. So he had to ask the landlord to give him a hand with the customer.

"Police sent you. is it?" said Aled Gruffydd.

Dai nodded. "Said could they have him stored until they find his relatives down in England." He lifted up the tailgate of the hearse and pulled out the lightweight fibreglass coffin with one hand. "Well, see. I don't mind jobs like this, even on a Sunday. Sooner or later some bugger pays the bill." He smiled slyly. "English prices, isn't it?"

The bedroom was almost directly over the bar. It had a very low ceiling and wasn't really big enough for three men even if one would be forever still.

"Above and beyond, this is, Dai." Aled grunted as they laid the body on a plastic sheet next to the coffin. It was going to be a tight fit. "Not what I'd call a small man, the Professor. Also, seemed to smell a good deal better, I remember, when he was alive."

"Obviously went off in a bit of a sweat." Dai observed.

The customer was somewhere between late middle-age and elderly. There was a touch of froth, which nobody had bothered to wipe away, at the side of his mouth.

"Professor, you say?" Dai said conversationally, trying not to react to the expression on the face of the customer. He was reminded of the time he'd removed a body from a dentist's chair, a man, who — mortally afraid of dentists all his life — had expired at the very moment of extraction.

"Well, of sorts." Aled was small, but wiry and strong enough to take the corpse's weight at the shoulders. "Big Morgan, it was, first started calling him that. Retired teacher, I suppose, or a college lecturer. Some sort of historian. Always walking around making notes, looking at things, never at people, you know the kind. Oh. Christ, I forgot they did that. Pass me that cloth, will you, Dai."

"Sorry, Aled. Should have thought." In this part of the world most people still knew the basics of it. They had not grown up with funeral parlours; laying out their relatives was something most of them had had to learn, like changing a wheel. Not only was it uneconomical to pay somebody like Dai to prepare a corpse, it was also still considered in many homes — and particularly, he'd found, in Y Groes — to be less than polite to the deceased.

"Can you do anything about that?" Aled asked, nodding at the face. "Or does he have to go to his maker looking as though somebody was amputating his leg without the anaesthetic?"

Dai made a professional appraisal of the customer's blue and twisted features, working out how they might be rearranged. "Easy," he said loftily. "Piece of piss. What was it anyway?"

"Well, heart. Angina, something of that order. Dr. Wyn said he was not surprised at all. Been coming here for months, see. Had his pills through Dr. Wyn regular."

"Why was that?"

"Well, convenient, I suppose."

"No, no. I mean why did he come here? The fishing?"

"No, I was telling you. Historian or something. Into old churches."

"Not old houses?" In Dai's experience, most of the English people who persistently returned to this area were looking to buy a piece of it, some little stone cottage with an inglenook and a view of the mountains. "Buggers go crazy over places like this."

"Do they now?" Aled said. "Well, well."

"Name your price, man, place like this. Name your bloody price."

Aled made no reply. Dai looked for an expression in the landlord's compact face, but none was apparent. All the same, he decided this was as good an opening as any, and he said carefully, "You know… I was only thinking myself, well, I wouldn't mind retiring to Y Groes, me and the wife. Nowhere quite like it, see, for the peace and quiet. Casual like. In passing. Not sounding as serious as he really was. "But hell, man, I don't suppose I could afford it any more, even with selling the business, the way things are going, the prices."

"Where do you want him?" Aled asked, as if he hadn't heard any of this. "In that thing, is it?"

"In the shell."

"The what?"

"Shell. What we call it. Utility job, see. Just to get him to the warehouse, and then the relatives choose something more tasteful." Dai tapped the side of the light-coloured coffin to show how cheap and flimsy it was, then returned hopefully, to his theme. "What's the answer, though? What is the answer? Local boy wants a home of his own, priced out of the market before he starts. Got to go, isn't it? No option. Winds up in bloody Birmingham or somewhere and all the rich buggers who couldn't tell a Welsh mountain ewe from a Beulah speckle-faced if you drew 'em a diagram are moving in and building bloody squash courts. Well, of course, I have nothing against the English, as a race… Right, now, you get the other side and we'll… Ah, lovely job."

Both men stood back. Dai Death mopped his bald head with a handkerchief. "So, tell me, purely out of interest, like… How much are they fetching?"

"Beulah speckle-faced?"

"Houses, man! What would it cost for me to get a place here? How much did the last one go for?"

"I can't remember. It was a long time ago."

"Oh, come on now!" Dai was getting a bit exasperated. What Aled was supposed to say was, well, Dai, funny you should bring that up because there's this very interesting little place I know of, not on the market yet, but if they thought you were keen — you being a local boy, a Welsh- speaker and a respected professional man — I'm sure a nice quick deal could be arranged, no fuss, no estate agents.

"That it?" Aled demanded. "Finished, have we?"

"I can't credit that at all," Dai said. "Bloody hell, in Pont, I'm not kidding, the estate agents' signs have been going up faster than the TV aerials when we got the first transmitter."

"So they tell me." said Aled.

"But not here."

"No." A note of finality. "Not here."

Dai was baffled and felt slighted. What, he wondered, had happened to Tegwyn Jones's place now his wife was also dead? Every village always had a couple of houses ready for the market, especially now, when the English would pay a small fortune for something you wouldn't keep chickens in. And what about — now here was a point — what about the judge's house?

"Having the lid on, are we. Dai?"

"I'll deal with that. Tricky, this sort. Professional use only." Dai straightened up, gathering what was left of his dignity. They only ever called him out here for the foreigners, like that chap Martin, the curate. And poor Bethan's man.

He sniffed. For Judge Rhys there'd been a coffin custom-made by Dewi Fon, the carpenter, gravestone by Myrddin Jones, the sculptor. He went out to the landing and returned with a rectangular strip of fibreglass. which he slotted into place, concealing the dreadful face of the Professor. Wondering gloomily who would be doing this job in ten years' time when he and Harri had retired. Harri being a bachelor and Dai's son away at university to study engineering. No doubt the business would get taken over by one of these national chains with colour brochures of coffins and off-the-peg shrouds. Well, bollocks to that.

"So what happened," he asked bluntly, "to the judge's house?"

"Well done, Dai," said Aled. ignoring the question.

"Look, come and have a drink before we take him down."

He towed the coffin away from the bedroom door so they could get out. "There, see… getting soft, I am, helping you with your bloody corpse then offering you a drink." He smiled. "Stiff one, is it?"

"Very funny." said Dai Death. "I'll have a pint and I'll pay you for it."

"Good God. Epidemic of something fatal, is there, in Pontmeurig, that you're so wealthy?"

"The judge's house." Dai reminded him, annoyed now and showing it. "Just tell me what happened to the fucking judge's house?"

Driving away, customer in the back. Dai took careful note. And, yes, it was true enough. Not a For Sale sign anywhere in the village He shook his head in disbelief, afflicted by the usual aching longing as he took in the mellow stone and timber-framed dwellings, the crooked stone steps and walled gardens, the soft fields and the stately oaks, the wooded amphitheatre of hills sloping to the Nearly Mountains. Even the bloody Nearly Mountains, wind-blasted and conifer-choked… even they looked impressive when viewed from Y Groes.

He looked back towards the lane which led to the judge's house. It would have been perfect. Not too big, not too small, nicely screened. But a lost cause. Christ, he'd never even heard of the old chap having a grand-daughter. Recluse who never left the village, never even went into Pontmeurig.

Maybe — he brightened momentarily — maybe she'd want to sell. But then — his spirits sagging again — what would she do but advertise it in the London papers?

It was, he thought, only a matter of time. They were bound to discover this place, the English. Some young stockbroker-type would cruise out here in his Porsche and spot a derelict bam, ripe for conversion, and make the farmer an offer he'd be a fool to refuse. And another farmer would hear about it and he'd sell two of his buildings. Then some poor widow would be staggered at how much she could get for her cottage. And, in no time at all, there'd be a little colony of English, enough to hold a bridge party with After Eight mints.

Dai gave Y Groes a final rueful glance before turning into the forestry.

And in time, he thought, the little clutch of eggs will turn rotten in the nest.